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10 Tips for Cooking the Best Burgers (In No Particular Order)

1.Always toast your buns. A little butter and a hot pan or grill will wake up your buns, softening the middles and crispening the bottoms.

2.Don’t add stuff to your beef, except salt. (Exception: the James Beard Foundation’s Blended Burger Project, try that one.)

3.Always use 80/20 ground beef that you grind yourself, or get from a local butcher or grocery with great sustainability standards.

4.Buy fresh, local, in-season ingredients. I’m writing this book in the early spring, so you are not going to see a ton of tomatoes here, even though I’d love to tell you how great our tomatoes are in Sacramento.

5.Get your “mise” in place. Mise en place is a French cooking term for “everything in its place.” “Oh, merde” means “I can’t find the mayo, and now the burgers are getting cold, and the buns are on fire” (or something close to that). Lay out all your burger ingredients before you get started.

6.Big fat burgers are not my favorite. All these recipes use a quarter pound patty. If you want more beef, grill up two and do a double stack, but don’t make a giant half pound hockey puck of meat.

7.After cooking the burgers, let them rest on a clean plate for a few minutes to let the juices sink back into the patty, or you’re going to soak through your buns.

8.Proper burger construction: bottom bun, then mayo/mustard, then lettuce (which will help form a barrier between juicy beef and bready bun), then the beef, then the rest of the toppings. Lettuce, you have a job to do.

9.Flavor balance. I like to add weird stuff in my burgers, like kumquat jam. But to do this, you also need a salty element to balance it out, like manchego cheese. When mixing flavors, try to always think about sweet, salty, bitter, and sour (you know, how your tongue works!).

10.Have fun. They are just burgers. You can remove a topping if it’s not working (flicks olive off top of bun), or you can make the next one different.